}
20. The building up of an effective Children's Section went on throughout the period under review. On the 1st April, 1948 the Social Welfare Office took over the five women officers and the clerk who had previously been in the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs' Muitsai Inspectorate. That organization had been designed since 1930 first to control and then to suppress the Muitsai system, to assist in suppressing the traffic in children, and to keep an official eye on the families where children might be in danger of sale, or of ill-treatment. The five inspectors had the necessary powers for inspections, prosecutions, and registrations. With their transfer to the Social Welfare Office in 1948, and with the concurrence and encouragement of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs the title Muitsai Inspectorate was abolished in favour of a new title, Women and Children's Section, and the five inspectors were for the time renamed Social Workers. New responsibilities were than taught these officers, as they learned the different approaches required of them. They were taught to develop friendlier and less formal relations with children's guardians, and to attempt to win their co-operation for the ultimate good of the children as future citizens. They were given elementary training in recognizing any changes in a child's home circumstances which ought to be either encouraged or checked, and they were taught how to set about that work in a practical way. These Children's Officers, as they came to be called in 1950, were also helped to make themselves more familiar with the local religious, social, educa- tional, and health services, to improve their knowledge of the law and its administration for the welfare of Hong Kong's children, and to find out for themselves the policies and practices of the larger voluntary organizations and institutions interested in child welfare.
21. Nevertheless, the training was by no means as thorough as it should have been. Accordingly, Miss J. Cheung-a member of the staff with a social science degree, a number of years' full-time experience elsewhere in general and in child welfare, and over a year's work and training in the Social Welfare Office-was granted a Colonial Development and Welfare Scholarship in 1950 to take further training in
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